SOURCE: Raiger, Michael. “‘Large and Startling Figures’: The Grotesque and the Sublime in the Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor.” In Seeing into the Life of Things: Essays on Literature and Religious Experience, edited by John L. Mahoney, pp. 242-70. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Raiger explores O'Connor's use of modern forms, particularly the grotesque and the sublime, in her short fiction.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God's Grandeur”

The author of “God's Grandeur” raises the central problem that would confront Flannery O'Connor in her fictional work: how to point out to an unapprehending soul the obvious fact that God is everywhere present to creation? However, unlike the great...